Announcements
Brief items
Tor: a landmark for hidden services
The Tor Project's .onion (hidden services) addresses have been formally approved as a Special Use Domain Name by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). "[Jacob] Appelbaum, a security researcher and advocate at the Tor Project and Alec Muffett, a software engineer at Facebook, co-authored the Request for Comments (RFC 7686) to the IETF. Hidden services are used by human rights defenders, political organizers, journalists, diplomats, and ordinary people around the world who want to chat, email, blog or do other everyday work privately and without the use of a centralized, hackable server."
FSFE signs association joint letter for terminal device freedom
The Free Software Foundation Europe, together with several other civil and economic organizations, sent a letter to numerous members of the German Bundestag concerning the compulsory routers issue. "The bill is the outcome of a long discussion about so-called compulsory routers. These forbid internet users to use a terminal device of their choice and force them to always have the provider's device in the own home network. This widespread practise is a threat to security, privacy, and independence of all internet users and has negative effects on free and fair competition of manufacturers."
Videos and photos from the FSF30 celebrations now available
The Free Software Foundation has released photos and videos from its 30th anniversary party and satellite celebrations from around the world.An update on the VMware suit
The Software Freedom Conservancy has posted an update on the GPL-infringement suit against VMware filed by Christoph Hellwig. "The lawsuit continues to progress. VMware has filed a statement of defense, in which they assert arguments for the dismissal of the action. Christoph, with the assistance of his lawyer Till Jaeger, has filed his response to these arguments. Unfortunately, VMware has explicitly asked for the filings not to be published and, accordingly, Conservancy has not been able to review either document. With the guidance of counsel, Christoph was able to provide Conservancy with a high-level summary of the filings from which we are able to provide this update. VMware's statement of defense primarily focuses on two issues. First, VMware questions Christoph's copyright interest in the Linux kernel and his right to bring this action. Second, VMware claims vmklinux is an 'interoperability module' which communicates through a stable interface called VMK API."
Articles of interest
EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that the Librarian of Congress has granted security researchers and others the right to inspect and modify the software in their cars and other vehicles. "EFF also won an [DMCA] exemption for users who want to play video games after the publisher cuts off support. For example, some players may need to modify an old video game so it doesn’t perform a check with an authentication server that has since been shut down. The Librarian also granted EFF’s petition to renew a previous exemption to jailbreak smartphones, and extended that to other mobile devices, including tablets and smartwatches. This clarifies the law around jailbreaking, making clear that users are allowed to run operating systems and applications from any source, not just those approved by the manufacturer. EFF also won the renewal and partial expansion of the exemptions for remix videos that use excerpts from DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, or downloading services."
Calls for Presentations
CFP Deadlines: October 29, 2015 to December 28, 2015
The following listing of CFP deadlines is taken from the LWN.net CFP Calendar.
| Deadline | Event Dates | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 30 | January 30 January 31 |
Free and Open Source Developers Meeting | Brussels, Belgium |
| October 30 | January 21 January 24 |
SCALE 14x - Southern California Linux Expo | Pasadena, CA, USA |
| October 31 | November 20 November 22 |
FUEL GILT Conference 2015 | Pune, India |
| November 2 | December 4 December 5 |
Haskell in Leipzig | Leipzig, Germany |
| November 23 | March 19 March 20 |
LibrePlanet | Boston, MA, USA |
| November 24 | December 14 December 16 |
SciPy India 2015 | Bombay, India |
| November 24 | May 16 May 19 |
OSCON 2016 | Austin, TX, USA |
| November 30 | February 1 | MINIXCon 2016 | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| November 30 | February 5 February 7 |
DevConf.cz 2016 | Brno, Czech Republic |
| December 12 | February 1 | Sysadmin Miniconf | Geelong, Australia |
| December 20 | February 10 February 12 |
netdev 1.1 | Seville, Spain |
If the CFP deadline for your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Upcoming Events
Freedombox Hackathon
There will be a Freedombox hackathon on October 31 at the offices of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York City.Postgres Conference China 2015
Postgres Conference China will be held November 20-22 in Beijing. "The first day(20th) will be the session in Chinese, People from PingAn, the biggest insurance company in China, will give a keynote about Postgres adoption experience, also China Mobile will give a talk about their initial adoption of Postgres-XC, and there are a lot of use cases. The second day(21th) will be session in Bilanguage, it is focusing on Postgres Cluster, we had invited community members, Tatsuo Ishii,Suzuki Koichi, Mason Sharp, KaiGai Kohei,Oleg Bartunov, Alexander Korotkov to give talks to us. And the last day(22th) is the Postgres-XC/XL relative developers meetings, major members in the Postgres-X communities will gather together to discuss the future development."
SCALE 14x Ubucon
SCALE 14X has announced that Ubucon, a network of conferences focusing on Ubuntu, will take place during SCALE 14X. SCALE will be held January 21-24 in Pasadena, CA. Ubucon will be held on January 21-22. "With Mark Shuttleworth giving the Ubucon keynote, the event will be structured as a traditional conference with presentations, demos and plenaries on the first day and as an unconference for the second one. There will also be two tracks grouping sessions by theme. The Users track is intended for those interested in learning about the non-tech, day-to-day part of using Ubuntu, as well as how to contribute to Ubuntu as an advocate. The Developers track will cover the sessions of interest to the amateur/professional developer, including topics like app development, IoT, convergence, cloud and more."
Register for LibrePlanet 2016
Registration is open for LibrePlanet. "The conference will be held March 19-20, 2016, in the Boston area -- this year's theme is "Fork the System." Talks at this year's conference will touch on how free software creates the opportunity of a new path for its users, allows developers to fight the restrictions of a system dominated by proprietary software by creating free replacements, and is the foundation of a philosophy of freedom, sharing, and change." The call for papers ends November 16.
Events: October 29, 2015 to December 28, 2015
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| October 27 October 29 |
Open Source Developers' Conference | Hobart, Tasmania |
| October 27 October 30 |
OpenStack Summit | Tokyo, Japan |
| October 27 October 30 |
PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2015 | Vienna, Austria |
| October 29 | FOSS4G Belgium 2015 | Brussels, Belgium |
| October 30 | Software Freedom Law Center Conference | New York, NY, USA |
| November 3 November 5 |
EclipseCon Europe 2015 | Ludwigsburg, Germany |
| November 5 November 7 |
systemd.conf 2015 | Berlin, Germany |
| November 5 November 8 |
mini-DebConf | Cambridge, UK |
| November 6 November 8 |
Dublin blockchain hackathon | Dublin, Ireland |
| November 6 November 8 |
Jesień Linuksowa 2015 | Hucisko, Poland |
| November 7 November 8 |
OpenFest 2015 | Sofia, Bulgaria |
| November 7 November 8 |
PyCON HK 2015 | Hong Kong, Hong Kong |
| November 7 November 9 |
PyCon Canada 2015 | Toronto, Canada |
| November 8 November 13 |
Large Installation System Administration Conference | Washington, D.C., USA |
| November 9 November 11 |
PyData NYC 2015 | New York, NY, USA |
| November 9 November 11 |
KubeCon | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| November 10 November 12 |
Allseen Alliance Summit | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| November 10 November 11 |
Open Compliance Summit | Yokohama, Japan |
| November 10 November 13 |
Black Hat Europe 2015 | Amsterdam, The Netherlands |
| November 11 November 13 |
LDAP Conference 2015 | Edinburgh, UK |
| November 14 November 15 |
NixOS Conference 2015 | Berlin, Germany |
| November 14 November 15 |
PyCon Czech 2015 | Brno, Czech Republic |
| November 15 November 20 |
Supercomputing 15 | Austin, TX, USA |
| November 16 November 19 |
Open Source Monitoring Conference 2015 | Nuremberg, Germany |
| November 17 November 18 |
PGConf Silicon Valley | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| November 18 November 19 |
Paris Open Source Summit | Paris, France |
| November 18 November 22 |
Build Stuff 2015 | Vilnius, Lithuania |
| November 19 | NLUUG fall conference 2015 | Bunnik, The Netherlands |
| November 19 November 21 |
FOSSETCON 2015 | Orlando, Florida, USA |
| November 20 November 22 |
Postgres User Conference China 2015 | Beijing, China |
| November 20 November 22 |
FUEL GILT Conference 2015 | Pune, India |
| November 21 November 22 |
PyCon Spain 2015 | Valencia, Spain |
| November 21 | LinuxPiter Conference | Saint-Petersburg, Russia |
| November 21 November 22 |
Capitole du Libre 2015 | Toulouse, France |
| November 28 | Technical Dutch Open Source Event | Eindhoven, The Netherlands |
| December 4 December 5 |
Haskell in Leipzig | Leipzig, Germany |
| December 5 December 6 |
openSUSE.Asia Summit | Taipei, Taiwan |
| December 8 December 9 |
Node.js Interactive | Portland, OR, USA |
| December 14 December 16 |
SciPy India 2015 | Bombay, India |
| December 27 December 30 |
32. Chaos Communication Congress | Hamburg, Germany |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol